Topics: Conspicuity, In Pavement Lighting, Stop Signs, NYC DeliverEASE, NJ Bridge Closure, Atlanta Traffic Snowpocalypse

Websites and Citations:

Chapter 2A of the Federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices

Redesigning the Stop Sign

NYC DeliverEASE Report

Waterfall Stop sign in Sydney

Theme Music: Five Star Fall, Mercurial Girl, Magnatune.com

Episode 44 – Grab Bag

Hello and welcome to another episode of Talking Traffic. My name is Bill Ruhsam and I host this podcast and it’s sister website, talkingtraffic.org. Today is February 2nd, 2014 and this is episode 44 of Talking Traffic.

Today we’re doing a grab bag of topics. There has been a bunch of stuff piling up for me to talk about but a lot of it has been of a short and sweet variety. Rather than do an individual podcast for each, which would last about 5 minutes, I decided to put together several into a miscellaneous topic episode. I’m going to talk about conspicuity, in-pavement lighting, the first stop signs, and the September 2013 New Jersey George Washington Bridge traffic fiasco.

…and the Atlanta Traffic Disaster of 2014. But that’s at the end and it will be off-script.

First off, lets talk about one of the words I learned solely as a result of me being a traffic engineer: Conspicuity.

Chapter 2A of the Federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices or MUTCD describes the requirements and applications when it comes to traffic signs. The MUTCD is described in more detail in episode 9 of Talking Traffic, but to sum up, it is the manual in the United States which sets out the requirements and guidelines for putting up traffic control devices such as signs and striping. Chapter 2A uses the term “conspicuity” 10 times and I love saying that word. Conspicurity. Conspicuity. It’s like some friendly disease. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what it means, but just in case, Merriam Webster defines Conspicuity as the quality or state of being conspicuous. The MUTCD is solely concerned with making things more conspicuous, or in the language of chapter 2A-15, enhancing the conspicuity for standard signs.

You can do many things to enhance the conspicuousness of sigs including making them larger, putting up more than one of them (so-called double-indicating where you put an identical sign on the left hand side of the road), adding flags or flashing beacons, or my favorite, adding a strip of reflective sheeting to the sign post. You see this occasionally with stop signs, a long and tall strip of red reflective material that covers up the post. It does indeed make the sign more conspicuous leading to greater CONSPICUITY.

I love that word.

Another item that can lead to greater conspicuity is in-pavement lighting. In pavement lighting is just that, lights that are inserted into the pavement to, in the words of the MUTCD, “…warn road users that they are approaching a condition on or adjacent to the roadway that might not be readily apparent and might require the road users to slow down and/or come to a stop.”

Despite that very general statement, to my knowledge these in pavement lighting installations have been used universally at pedestrian crosswalks. They are set so that when a person presses the crosswalk button, they light up and begin to flash to alert approaching drivers that there’s a crosswalk ahead. Crosswalks are difficult to see from the perspective of the driver and these lights help their CONSPICUITY! Unfortunately, they’re also expensive and require maintenance. Any damage to the road surface almost invariably breaks the in pavement lighting power supply. There has to be a commitment on the part of the installing agency to maintain and repair them. The few before/after studies I’ve seen show that they are absolutely good things to install to increase the number of drives stopping for pedestrians, so that’s a good thing. Alas, they also seem to be falling out of favor amongst agencies.

Going off script for a moment…

The next item I’[...]